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They would rather wait 45 minutes for the confessional. When I give lectures, people will wait behind until there is no one around and then tell me quietly: ‘I seem to be one of those people who need eight or nine hours’ sleep.’ It’s embarrassing to say it in public. We want to seem busy, and one way we express that is by proclaiming how little sleep we’re getting. “We have stigmatised sleep with the label of laziness. All these are the enemies of sleep.”īut Walker believes, too, that in the developed world sleep is strongly associated with weakness, even shame. Alcohol and caffeine are more widely available. We’re a lonelier, more depressed society. No one wants to give up time with their family or entertainment, so they give up sleep instead. Second, there is the issue of work: not only the porous borders between when you start and finish, but longer commuter times, too. “Light is a profound degrader of our sleep. “First, we electrified the night,” Walker says. Why, exactly, are we so sleep-deprived? What has happened over the course of the last 75 years? In 1942, less than 8% of the population was trying to survive on six hours or less sleep a night in 2017, almost one in two people is.
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I could double the NHS budget if only they would institute policies to mandate or powerfully encourage sleep.” I get on a flight at 10am when people should be at peak alert, and half of the plane has immediately fallen asleep Sleep loss costs the UK economy over £30bn a year in lost revenue, or 2% of GDP. But when did you ever see an NHS poster urging sleep on people? When did a doctor prescribe, not sleeping pills, but sleep itself? It needs to be prioritised, even incentivised. Things have to change: in the workplace and our communities, our homes and families.
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And yet no one is doing anything about it. “It sinks down into every possible nook and cranny. “No aspect of our biology is left unscathed by sleep deprivation,” he says. Walker wants major institutions and law-makers to take up his ideas, too. But, in the end, the individual can achieve only so much. Walker has spent the last four and a half years writing Why We Sleep, a complex but urgent book that examines the effects of this epidemic close up, the idea being that once people know of the powerful links between sleep loss and, among other things, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity and poor mental health, they will try harder to get the recommended eight hours a night (sleep deprivation, amazing as this may sound to Donald Trump types, constitutes anything less than seven hours). This situation, he believes, is only likely to change if government gets involved. It’s his conviction that we are in the midst of a “catastrophic sleep-loss epidemic”, the consequences of which are far graver than any of us could imagine. When Walker talks about sleep he can’t, in all conscience, limit himself to whispering comforting nothings about camomile tea and warm baths. But even as we contemplate the shadows beneath our eyes, most of us don’t know the half of it – and perhaps this is the real reason he has stopped telling strangers how he makes his living. As the line between work and leisure grows ever more blurred, rare is the person who doesn’t worry about their sleep. No wonder, then, that people long for his counsel. To be specific, he is the director of the Center for Human Sleep Science at the University of California, Berkeley, a research institute whose goal – possibly unachievable – is to understand everything about sleep’s impact on us, from birth to death, in sickness and health. I just tell people I’m a dolphin trainer. On an aeroplane, it usually means that while everyone else watches movies or reads a thriller, he will find himself running an hours-long salon for the benefit of passengers and crew alike. M atthew Walker has learned to dread the question “What do you do?” At parties, it signals the end of his evening thereafter, his new acquaintance will inevitably cling to him like ivy.